HART'S THE ONE:

Hart suggests giving each newborn $1,000: Ex-senator concludes test for campaign run (Mike Soraghan, March 05, 2003, Denver Post)

In his last major policy address before deciding whether he'll run for president, former Sen. Gary Hart called for every American child to receive $1,000 at birth in a fund that would be invested until he or she wanted to buy a house or go to college.

It's far too little and everything else he said was nonsense, but that's the first good idea a Democrat has offered in this campaign. A bolder vision would be to have the Feds start out a child in life with a Medical Savings Account--of four, six, ten or however many thousand dollars--that parents and/or empoyers, or the government in the case of the poor, can then contribute to (before taxes) every year and that builds until they're ready to go to college or buy a house or whatever. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 6, 2003 8:04 AM